Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Fuzz Orchestra Interview- This one got lost in my archives and somehow was never published until now. It was taken during Fuzz Orchestra's first US tour.

VP: Fuzz Orchestra has a sound all it's own. Was this premeditated or
did you develop your style as a result of individuality and practice?

FO: We developed our style through practice.

We have been playing together for 10 years in other
band before Fuzz Orchestra. It was composed by us 3 and another guitarist, the
band was called Bron Y Aur and it was based on rock improvisation. That's to
say that we know each other, musically and personally, quite well.

The sound came out when Fiè switched from bass to
mixer, I (Luca) left my Rat distortion pedal for an HBE UFO Fuzz and Marco put
his tom toms away.

VP: Do you still incorporate the improvisations with Fuzz
Orchestra or are you now writing more song structure?

FO: Our compositions often come out from improvisation,
so it's still a great part of our way of creating music.

VP: Your embarking on a US tour at the time of this
interview. Is there a difference between touring in the US vs. touring in
Europe? How is the crowd here reacting to your explosive live performance?

FO: We haven't found any great difference...the
crowd reacted very well,

they seemed to enjoyed our mixture of hard rock and
Italian influences.

Our tour has just finished yesterday in NY and
we're very happy about it.

We had a great response from the crowd and we've
found a great hospitality that maybe was the best thing about touring the USA.

VP: Do you feel that there is a growing audience
for experimental and improvisational music? Are people becoming more open minded
to bands that have basic skeletal song structure vs. the traditional band that
plays the same music the same way night after night?

FO: Mmmmm...I would like this to be true, but I
think that it only happens that sometimes some bands become a fashion thing
(like Sunn O)), to mention one, or Lightning Bolt) and their audience grows a
lot.

The rest of the underground scene, for what I can
see in Italy and out of it, remains confined to the same number of persons,
more or less.

Interview with Michel KristofPlease explain the theory behing the MKF Approach to music. Is there structure within your improvisation or do you base the improvs purely on the moment?

My solo work as "MKF’s Approach" stems from an atmosphere that comes to my mind, and develops according to this mood and the story it inspires me to tell.

The execution and choice of instruments is then staged (with a particular attention to details) as to render, as faithfully as possible, the feeling of the song. Here, tape manipulations have their most important part.

I use the guitar mainly. I occasionally add sitar and esraj I have electrified; cymbals, tablas, bells, beads, even an electric counter .....

The idea is not necessarily to provide nice and orderly landscapes: the sounds and stories heard rather follow the intentional or unintentional curves of playing the instruments. There are even pieces where success lies in the fact that the listener does not listen to the whole song!

Then 21 years of total non-musical practice, "just" listening to the free jazz of 1960s and 70s, the electric guitars of Jimi Hendrix, Japanese noise, baroque music and contemporary European music ... all sounds that have slowly worked their ways in my Uncounscious.

In 2011 I returned to sitar at the urge of Sonny Simmons to help him shape his obsession of the East. And a return to my beloved guitar!

Hoping that the life of a salaryman does not prevent me to continue this process of expression in the near future…

How does your project Other Matter compare to the MKF Approach?

As in MKF, staging the music and telling stories are the word, rather than instrumental prowess or anything else. Sound in "Other Matter" is more sophisticated than MKF. The "tape manipulation" is carried out by Julien and his complicated softwares and methods!

Of course there is an interaction in the early moment of recording, before the sound gets heavily modified. “Other Matter”, before being a group, is a friendship we have carried on for 13 years: our mutual playing has been nurtured by listening to the same music, attending the same gigs, and the facts of life: separations, moving furniture together, etc. Life!

This is friendship realized in sound. And this is more excitement and fun than devising his own music in a corner: you have a sense of playing.

Although from the resulting dark music it doesn’t necessarily always show, OM is kind of fun to do. No pressure, no issues: it gives us complete freedom. That said, most people have noticed – and the titles and pictures that go with the music underline it – that OM has a rather somber, nihilistic approach.

For Julien and myself, returning to music playing was a conscious decision, and before we even realized we could actually play, has been an act of utter frustration at our lives as salarymen in a civilization that is seemingly going nowhere. While MKF rather tells personal, intimate stories from my trips and cultural encounters, OM deals with the global lack of meaning many people seem to experience as the XXIth Century goes onward. “Space is not the place anymore” did we write somewhere: this is a bitter comment on Sun Ra’s optimisim (not that we don’t like Sun Ra, who had voluntarily decided FOR optimism in the face of global decay). The universe is not home of the gods anymore; we were free to deal with it at last; and we did utter shit with it. Hence our fascination for the dreary, toxic aspects of astrophysics, emptiness, coldness of galaxies. Hence the chaos in our music.

We improvise everything. Nothing is written beforehand. We play without warning, doing our best to surprise each other. The mixing and mastering, afterwards, become a long process to make the obvious appear, to express hidden intentions.

How does your thoery's on music apply to your work with jazz legend Sonny Simmons?

This is reall Sonny Simmons who gave Julien and me the greenlight to be “artists”, whatever that means, as he often insists that Coltrane’s final statement was rightfully titled “EXPRESSION”. Hitherto we produced many of his albums (and www.sonnysimmons.orgwww.improvising-bengs.com). Working with such a Master puts you in a position, like it or not, of a disciple. It stirred our will to go back to it. Years of desires buried under layers of routine, low self-esteem due to poor working opportunities in tie and grey suit, for bosses trying to get you to believe that you are a mere number or an initial on the corner of an official paper – MKF!

Sonny, a godfather of free jazz, has a vision that goes beyond the labels: since 2011 we have organized wild free jams with poet Bruno Grégoire, Julien, Thomas Bellier of Blaak Heat Shujaa, piling hours of material that he will eventually organize in a symphonic way: a large work that will encompass free music, rock, eastern music, comprising saxophone, English horn, percussion, poetry, sitar, doom guitars…

I also recorded live with him in Paris, our first meeting as the group Moksha Samnyasin with Thomas Bellier (Blaak Heat Shuja, Ehécatl ) on bass, Sébastien Bismuth (Abrahma) on drums and myself on sitar. The live piece is currently treated by Julien for publication. It’s a very raw act that somehow pays tribute to Arthur Doyle’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble.

We did a proper studio session of this group, produced by Thomas Bellier – the album is ready and we are looking for an adventurous label!

Meeting with Sonny Simmons is instinctive and complete ! No compromises, no false pretenses, straight to the point! You forget everything you know and do not know, and your life and ass are on the line. His motto is “Serious as bone cancer”, sound is his life, and beware if music is not your goal when you meet him.

"MKF's Approach" and "Other Matter" would not exist without the support of Jay Reeve and Vinnie Paternostro, whose label "MUteantsoundsnetlabel" have highlighted most of our recordings first.

Thank you to Jay for trusting us and have initiated our beautiful relationship and Vinnie for asking us to give us all under their watchful eye!

VP: Sikhara has been known for playing some “unusual”
places. Please give me an example of some of these unknowns.

SN: The strange thing about playing in “unusual”
locales is they can be equally glorious and dubious. One of our more well
documented experiences; I had asked Kazuya Ishigami to find a temple we could
record in near Osaka. The Senkoji Temple where he chose was ideal.
Filled with 5th century old drums made by hand by Samuri. When we arrived
he asked to join us in the session. That was actually the inspiration
for my current film project in Taiwan. Yet by contrast, we were asked to
play in an abandoned tunnel underneath the city of Linz, Austria, and we
arrived to find it was the place where homosexual prostitutes bring their johns
to fuck and shoot up. So the ground was littered with old condoms and
syringes. I was always obsessesed with visiting Turkey and at the
first show in Istanbul in 2002, the venue turned out to be next door to the
Taxim police station and was guarded with machine guns. Kind of a good
reconciling of the two: I had been visiting Zabrze, Poland frequently and heard
tales from many people of their fathers/grandfathers contracting horrible
diseases working in the mines and had asked to visit one. They had called
for me and told they don’t really offer tourism, but some time later they
arranged for Sikhara to play in the tunnels of the mines. They showed me around
before and I saw the temple to Mary, where they would pray each day, due to the
frequent death of the workers.

VP: Out of these experiences, what has shaped the sound of
the band the most?

SN: The experience working on the "Temples of
Taichung" video, having come in the same time that we have been
incorporating a lot more "conventional" instruments, like bass and guitar,
has had a big impact. On one hand, we are stepping towards a more
accessible sound, but the primitive, ritual element I can see becoming more
cohesive.

I attended a ceremony in November for the
birthday of a god and the monks were performing this sort of dance while
chanting, that was really in tune with my own style of body movements in
concert. Doing a project for so long, you need that occasional reminder
what the origins of your whole concept is, and that affected me strongly.

It inspires me to take things in both
directions at the same time.

VP: The modern primitive, if you will. Is this an extension of a
religious rite in itself? Do you feel that your music can give people that same
experience as the shamanistic rituals once provided?

SN: That is clearly the goal, to provide this
feeling and experience, but I still consider myself a performer. Our
shows are heavily influenced by film and books; and I am trying to create
a character. I don't think this makes it any less valid, as the nature of
the musical project is very entangled with my own existence. Yet, I am
trying to tell a story, and I certainly hope my own life to be considerably
less violent and disembodied than the subject of my art.

VP: What up coming projects are you involved in now?

One of my primary units has become my ongoing
studio war with Jonathan Saldanha from Soopa, called United Scum
Soundclash. The new record has people from Barbez, Ovo, Steve Mackay,
Love 666 (my heros) and more people than possible to count. It is
exploring music from the technological side, but ends up to sound more organic
than many of my project.

Now, I am just getting ready to start a tour
that I organized and am playing on for Amps for Christ, who is Henry Barnes
from Man is The Bastard. MITB is one of my all time favorite and none of
them have ever played in Europe. I tried to book the tour to visit
a variety of locations and incorporate some audiences that might not be
prepared for what they are getting into

Right now, the "Temples of Taiwan"
project is my main concern. I have been invading the Taiwanese temples,
where they worship a combination of Buddhist and Taoist gods, with a heavy
influence from Confucianism. I put up a sketch of my work so far on
our website, but I won't get around to the final results until this
fall.

VP: Is there any uncharted territory Sikhara plans to invade
in the near future?

SN: Right now I am in Taiwan, so seeking out some new
cities for the "Temples of Taiwan" DVD. So many of the best
spots seem to be hidden away. Lots of the best opportunities for footage
occur for small festival, where they make ritual performance. They don't
generally advertise these events, so you have to stumble into him.
Although when you visit 20 temples a day, you have plenty of opportunity to ask
the Gods for help. I just found a village in San Yi, which is only
known because of their woodcarvings. They had just skinned a massive
drum with Tibetan buffalo hide. The master monk of the temple took some
time to show me around and let me play a 6-foot diameter gong that his teacher
had designed.

Next stop is Sun Moon Lake, sort of a
mystical place of Taiwan. The Thao, smallest of the aboriginal tribes are
based there, so I am hoping to engage them in a little collaboration.

It is certainly a shame that Sikhara will be
off the road this spring, but I am very excited about the film and recording
projects that will be coming together over the next months.

Definitely encourage everyone to check out our
website for updates. There is a rough draft from the Taiwan film
available and also recently posted, is a segment from the Hop Frog Kollectiv's
most recent festival in the Mohave dessert. www.sikhara.org